Today I am thinking about home.

For a pathological homebody, I am notoriously, outrageously bad at ever visiting home - and by home I mean the house I was born and brought up in, where my parents, sister and dog still live and where, by virtue of my student status, I think I legally still live as well.

I tend to leave a long time between visits for a couple of reasons - one, my family drive me nuts if I spend too much time with them, and two, I have job commitments that require me to be in York pretty much all year round, with the same holiday entitlements as any job.

So it's a recent thing, really, the idea of not returning home every term for a month or more at a time, to the comforts of regular laundry and cooked meals and vegetables and curfews and rules.

I've kind of learnt to treasure it, because of that. As much as I love "my" life (my York life), there's still only one place I'll ever call home in the truest of senses.

As Gabrielle Aplin so nicely puts it, "home is where you go to rest your bones." And there's only one place I can visit and leave feeling genuinely rested.

I love this song - it really hits the nail on the head. "I'm a phoenix in the water/ A fish that's learnt to fly/ And I've always been a daughter/But feathers are meant for the sky." Like, I really quite like being a flying fish. But I might only be able to fully relax when I'm back in the oceans of home.

Or something.

"I'll always keep you with me/You'll be always on my mind/But there's a shining in the shadows/I'll never know unless I try."

Life's about chasing the shining in the shadows, apparently. I'm trying to interpret these lyrics in the least dramatic way possible, because they are just about the natural process of being away from home. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that home, real home, never really leaves you at all. And that's great.